Multi-part question about multi-threading, locks and multi-core processors (multi ^ 3)
- by MusiGenesis
I have a program with two methods. The first method takes two arrays as parameters, and performs an operation in which values from one array are conditionally written into the other, like so:
void Blend(int[] dest, int[] src, int offset)
{
for (int i = 0; i < src.Length; i++)
{
int rdr = dest[i + offset];
dest[i + offset] = src[i] > rdr? src[i] : rdr;
}
}
The second method creates two separate sets of int arrays and iterates through them such that each array of one set is Blended with each array from the other set, like so:
void CrossBlend()
{
int[][] set1 = new int[150][75000]; // we'll pretend this actually compiles
int[][] set2 = new int[25][10000]; // we'll pretend this actually compiles
for (int i1 = 0; i1 < set1.Length; i1++)
{
for (int i2 = 0; i2 < set2.Length; i2++)
{
Blend(set1[i1], set2[i2], 0); // or any offset, doesn't matter
}
}
}
First question: Since this apporoach is an obvious candidate for parallelization, is it intrinsically thread-safe? It seems like no, since I can conceive a scenario (unlikely, I think) where one thread's changes are lost because a different threads ~simultaneous operation.
If no, would this:
void Blend(int[] dest, int[] src, int offset)
{
lock (dest)
{
for (int i = 0; i < src.Length; i++)
{
int rdr = dest[i + offset];
dest[i + offset] = src[i] > rdr? src[i] : rdr;
}
}
}
be an effective fix?
Second question: If so, what would be the likely performance cost of using locks like this? I assume that with something like this, if a thread attempts to lock a destination array that is currently locked by another thread, the first thread would block until the lock was released instead of continuing to process something.
Also, how much time does it actually take to acquire a lock? Nanosecond scale, or worse than that? Would this be a major issue in something like this?
Third question: How would I best approach this problem in a multi-threaded way that would take advantage of multi-core processors (and this is based on the potentially wrong assumption that a multi-threaded solution would not speed up this operation on a single core processor)? I'm guessing that I would want to have one thread running per core, but I don't know if that's true.
